


Conservation of Matter

by thisisthefamilybusiness



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Child Death, Gen, Graphic References to Child Violence and Cannibalism, Magical Realism, Past Violence, Psychological Trauma, Survivor Guilt, Time Travel, dark angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 12:19:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisisthefamilybusiness/pseuds/thisisthefamilybusiness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not implausible that in the cycles of matter and energy, atoms may end up regathering themselves into a form they had already taken part in, in cosmic coincidence, part of the circular cycle of life and death and ever-constant existence.<br/>And cosmic coincidence happens to land on Hannibal Lecter's doorstep, in the form of the sobbing four year old Mischa Lecter, whole once more. </p><p>(Fill for the following prompt on HannibalKink: "Mischa Lecter shows up at Hannibal's doorstep looking no older than the last time he saw her. She's crying and she seems to be absolutely terrified of him.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conservation of Matter

The first law of thermodynamics says that all matter in the universe is all that there has ever been, and all that will ever be. All the atoms on Earth and in the cosmos have been there since it came into being, as stars and dinosaurs and comets and coniferous trees and human beings and the billions of other forms of existence. 

It's not implausible, then, that in the cycles of matter and energy, atoms may end up regathering themselves into a form they had already taken part in, in cosmic coincidence, part of the circular cycle of life and death and ever-constant existence. 

 

And cosmic coincidence happens to land on Hannibal Lecter's doorstep, in the form of a sobbing four year old girl, dressed in a filthy, torn floral dress, bare-legged and barefoot, ash-blonde hair caked with mud and leaves. Her skin is pale and grey-blue from cold, despite the summer heat, and her tears have left ruddy clean streaks down her cheeks. She is sucking on her thumb while she cries, occasionally mumbling words in a mishmash of languages that sounds like _Lithuanian-German-French-English_. 

 

Her name is Mischa Lecter, and she died forty years ago, in the cold woods of Lithuania where deserted Soviet soldiers took her away to play and then gnawed on her bones like desperation had gnawed on theirs, while her brother watched in mute horror as they poured for him a broth made of her boiled flesh. 

 

When Hannibal finally opens the door, to see what the source of the crying is, he collapses to his knees, scuffing his previously spotless shoes and ruining the knees of his previously impeccable wool slacks. 

 

He is unsure, for the first time in forty years, of what to do. If he reaches out and touches her, will she vanish, dissipate like a vision projected into the air, pulled back into the place in time and space where she came from? 

 

Or if she does not—if she is solid, and real, and Hannibal reaches out and settles his palm onto the small jawline of the only thing he has ever cared for, the one for whom he has spent his entire life trying to bring honour to so as to differentiate himself from the ones who stole his most beautiful belonging and desecrated her flesh, the one for whom he was only able to find mental peace when he accepted that her atoms were forever contained with himself—what will Hannibal do then? If this is a world where Mischa is made whole, brought to him by random happenstance of the universe—how is Hannibal supposed to react? Express gratitude? Never taste human flesh again? Save this Mischa as he never could forty years ago?

 

There are tears stinging Hannibal's eyes, but he ignores them, and instead reaches out to touch the girl on his doorstep. 

 

Mischa glances up, fright in her eyes, and skitters backwards, away from his touch, further down the doorstep. She gives another hiccuping sob, and whispers something in _Lithuanian-German-French-English_ , crying a little harder. 

 

"Mischa, Mischa, Mischa," Hannibal whispers, mostly incoherent, transfixed, frozen in place, hand still extended towards her, more tears prickling strangely at the corners of his eyes and forming in a tight knot right above his shirt-collar. "Hannibalas, Hannibal. Hannibal. Brother. Bruder. Brolis. Frère." Languages flit through his mind, snippets of syllables and phrases in every language he knows.

 

Mischa doesn't move, only stares at him, with her doe-like eyes so wide with fear.

 

"Mischa, my Mischa. I am Hannibal, Hannibal—your Hannibal, your brother." He mumbles, then, words to Ein Mannelein, and repeats them, convulsively, to her, as if a few lines of German song would take the terror from her eyes.

 

What does Mischa, whole again, regathered, see in him? Does she recognise her brother, who held her in his arms against the cold of the forest and the savage desperation of winter and starvation? 

 

What does she see in the fine lines of his outstretched hands, capable surgeon's hands now, hands that killed as readily as they had saved, hands that were no longer grey-blue with frostbite and bony from hunger? 

 

Hannibal can see in the brown of her eyes, beyond the fear, that there is no real recognition of who he is. Mischa, his beautiful Mischa, dead for forty years, made into flesh again, brought to him in strange thermodynamic chance, does not know who he is. 

 

For how many times, for how long, had Hannibal tried to find Mischa again, looking for her atoms in the eyes and flesh of girls and women, believing he had found her in the soft blue of Abigail Hobbs's eyes until he had been unable to protect her in this life?

 

And looking to the terrified eyes of his most beloved, Hannibal wonders what she sees, and tries to see his reflection in the mirror of her tears.

 

If she can't see her brother, grown, aged, as the frightened broken boy that became a monster in human flesh, as the one who killed for her, as the one who atoned for the sins of what ex-soldiers had done to desecrate her body and threw their own crimes in their faces, as the one who honoured her in his every action—what did Mischa see, instead? 

 

What did she see, behind his dead maroon eyes that stung with tears he had not known he could cry: the same hollow hunger of the men who dragged her to her death, the flat countenance of a dead man who has spent a very long time convincing people he was actually alive, the casual arrogance and quiet desolation of someone who has no concept of love or nostalgia or regret and therefore has nothing that can be taken from him? The emptiness and the void left when the only memories of childhood are of ugliest cruelty, horror, and cold, when a little boy watches the only thing he loves get slaughtered and the winter creeps into his soul where love should have been? 

 

Or perhaps Mischa cries because she knows, and she recognises her brother, who had tried everything he could to keep her safe, and the man still reaching for her is only his ghost in flesh, held together over four long decades only by faint memories and the laws of biology. Perhaps Mischa can see that Hannibal has clung on to the past and a perversion of the only emotion he can recall ever feeling—love for her—and that he, just like her, died in the snowy forest, and has arrived at the present moment only by chances of reality and science. 

 

"Mischa," Hannibal repeats. "My Mischa, Mischa." 

 

Mischa Lecter, dead for forty years but whole and crying on her brother's doorstep, is cosmic coincidence, thermodynamics proven correct. 

 

Her brother, shattered and broken and frozen as he tries to reach out to her, is only a shadow, a ghost of the little boy he once was, because the human soul, unlike matter, can be destroyed, and Hannibal's was crushed forty years ago in the cold woods of Lithuania where deserted Soviet soldiers took his sister away to play. 

**Author's Note:**

> "Conversation of Matter" is a reference to the first law of thermodynamics, which is the main rule referenced here, though it has been altered in magical realist fashion.


End file.
